Thank you. New question concerning text encoding

[grumfish]

Patrick Useldinger wrote:

> Just a guess "in the dark" (I don't use MySQL): is "commit" implicit, or 
> do you have to add it yourself?

Thank you. Inserts work fine now.

Another question. I'm trying to insert Japanese text into the table. I 
created the database using 'CHARACTER SET UTF8'. In Python I do a 
.encode("utf-8") on any strings before inserting them into the database. 
When I try to read them back from the database I don't get the original 
string. I've played with .decode("utf-8") on strings returned from MySQL 
but with no luck. How can I insert Japanese text into a MySQL database 
and the read it out again?